Targeting Cuba’s Health-Care SystemThe U.S. government’s half-century campaign to discredit and destroy Cuba’s experiment with socialism has had many ruthless aspects, but perhaps none more so than efforts to disparage and damage the Caribbean island’s widely admired health-care system, as William Blum describes in this guest essay.

By William Blum

June 4, 2011

In January, the government of the United States of America saw fit to seize $4.207 million in funds allocated to Cuba by the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for the first quarter of 2011, Cuba has charged. The UN Fund is a $22 billion a year program that works to combat the three deadly pandemics in 150 countries.

“This mean-spirited policy,” the Cuban government said, “aims to undermine the quality of service provided to the Cuban population and to obstruct the provision of medical assistance in over 100 countries by 40,000 Cuban health workers.”

Most of the funds are used to import expensive AIDS medication to Cuba, where antiretroviral treatment is provided free of charge to some 5,000 HIV patients.

The United States sees the Cuban health system and Havana’s sharing of such as a means of Cuba winning friends and allies in the Third World, particularly Latin America; a situation sharply in conflict with long-standing US policy to isolate Cuba.

2. That's just unbelievable. Surely no country can be that mean-spirited.

- making up stories- flat out lying- putting out a call for negative stories- U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck and Co. refusing to sell Elspar, needed by Cuban children suffering from lymphoblastic leukemiato- denial of visas requested to attend conferences in the field of Anesthesiology and Reanimation that take place in the United States- encouraging Cuban doctors who are serving their government overseas to defect and enter the U.S. immediately as refugees

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